From the outset, it was clear that this would be a performance of immaculate sonic architecture. Over a soft, deep, and breathy organ pedal the first utterings of the strings sounded tentative, almost improvised, like an artist making the first daubs on a vast empty canvas.

After full orchestral performances of Brahms’s Violin Concerto and First Symphony, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra shone a more intimate light on the composer’s oeuvre with a recital of chamber works in Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall on Sunday.

It’s dangerous to claim a sense of absolute rightness about a musical performance; that could mean no more than responding to an interpretation which happens to chime with your own subjective expectations. Yet I’m happy to stick my neck out and say that the partnership of septuagenarian pianist Elisabeth Leonskaja with the young Staatskapelle Quartet of Berlin felt absolutely right in works by Brahms that cry out in every bar for authentic musicianship (★★★★★).

Roger Norrington: The Complete Erato Recordings (Erato)

Nicola Benedetti and Sir Mark Elder are both in the enviable position of being able to take audiences with them into music territory that might scare some away. So it was a gratifyingly near-capacity house that heard Szymanowski’s Second Violin Concerto last night as – on the first occasion they have worked together – they presented it to the Hallé audience.

This was at first sight a somewhat ordinary looking programme for the BBC Philharmonic: Beethoven, Brahms … even Stravinsky doesn’t frighten a Saturday night audience in Manchester these days. 

The Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam began their two-concert visit to the Barbican with a crowd-pleasing programme: Brahms and Beethoven. We are used to hearing the pinpoint precision and transparent textures of the London Symphony Orchestra from the Barbican stage, but the Concertgebouw has a different sound.

Good conductors should surely be seen as well as heard. Positioned behind Emanuel Ax’s piano in Brahms’s first piano concerto, with the two flanks of the London Philharmonic’s strings spread wide on either side across the stage, Karin Canellakis sometimes looked from the stalls of the Royal Festival Hall as if she were directing the chamber ensemble of horns and woodwind just in front of her.

Epic-lyric magician Brahms wears a very adaptable garment for certain masterpieces: black on the outside with fur trimming, reversible to show its exquisitely wrought, variegated silk patterns on the inside.

What happens when great musicians play weak music? I couldn’t help but think about that while I listened to the musicians of Chineke! Chamber Ensemble (★★) on Friday morning in Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall. Chineke! was founded to provide opportunities for black and ethnically diverse classical musicians, so it’s a logical step for them also to promote music written by non-white composers, too. I wish they’d picked better music than what they played in this Edinburgh International Festival programme, though.